Hummingbirds (21 page)

That’s how she feels.

Good-bye Jeremy Notion! You little shiny thing! Good-bye, you glinting pebble, you water-softened stone.

The numbers on the elevator panel count down, each one with a barely audible tick. She has heard that they do that on purpose, that tick, for blind people, so they know what floor they’re on by counting the ticks.

That’s nice, she thinks. That’s a good thing to do for blind people.

She closes her eyes and listens to the ticks go by. But her
mind wanders back to Jeremy Notion and then to the character of Ivan from her play and then to Ms. Lockhart standing outside the school against the wrought iron fence and then to Mr. Hughes her English teacher, and she loses track of the ticks.

Blind people must have very good concentration, she determines.

When she reaches the ground floor, she walks quickly across the marble-tiled lobby and through the rotating door to the street, where the cold night air strikes her hard like broken glass—and she wonders if that’s what it’s like to be thrown through a window.

“S
eventy-five years ago—” Mrs. Mayhew begins and then waits for the auditorium to quiet down. She stands like a furnace, her smoldering gaze blasting heat out in the direction of any girls who are still whispering behind their hands or adjusting their skirts.

“Seventy-five years ago the Carmine-Casey School for Girls celebrated its first Christmas. Under the guidance of Charlotte Casey-McCallum, our founder, a woman of tremendous industry, compassion, and vision, this school opened its doors to a first-year class of only thirty-seven girls. The building has grown since that time, of course, to accommodate the more than four hundred students that we have here today, but whenever I consider those thirty-seven young women carrying their books through these halls when the marble was still new and the smell of wood shavings from the carved banisters was still lingering in the air—whenever I consider those young women, I imagine what it must have been like to embark upon something brand-new, something unique. A flagship of girls’ education. A touchstone the country over for progress, ingenuity, and the independence of women.”

The Carmine-Casey Christmas assembly always begins with an address by one of the three headmistresses on a rotating schedule. This year it’s Mrs. Mayhew’s turn, and because she is also chair of the English department, there is an expectation that the speech will be full of spirit and poetry. Unlike Mrs. Landry, a former calculus teacher, whose speeches are all business, very
purposeful and direct, as though she were drawing lines on the blackboard—as though she were holding a ruler beneath her voice.

Standing up on the stage at the front of the crowded, girl-smelling auditorium, broad, powerful Mrs. Mayhew possesses vigor. It chugs out of her like steam from an engine, her large bust projecting aggressively against the rivetlike buttons of her blouse.

“Seventy-five years. It may not surprise some of you that I have been here in this place for almost half of that time, first as a teacher of English, barely beyond girlhood myself, then as an administrator and headmistress, and I can tell you that this is a different school from the one through whose doors I once walked as a bright-eyed girl with a passion for Plato and Aeschylus and Sophocles. In fact, it is a different world from the one I knew then. I remember with great piercing clarity the values that were important to me as a young woman, the values that I carried around with me and that used to give my world alignment: honor, charity, self-reliance, and, most significant, integrity….”

“Quel
boring,” Dixie Doyle whispers to Andie next to her. “Why does she always have to talk like an old movie?” Andie shrugs but doesn’t have to time to respond because Mr. Pratt shushes them from the aisle, where he’s standing at attention with his hands clenched behind his back.

No, Dixie thinks. Not exactly an old movie. More like those superhero comics that Jeremy Notion had stacked in the corner of his bedroom. When he saw her looking at them while visiting one day, he said they were collector’s items—that he didn’t actually
read
them. They were filled with the same kind of big speeches, in bold, black lettering—all about
justice
and
honor
and
truth.
What do you do with those things other than declare them? And how do you really declare things anyway? Maybe it’s a skill that some people have, like juggling or crocheting, but it’s hard to get her mind around it. She wonders if she can do it, if there is any declaration in her waiting to get out. Maybe she
should try declaring something in front of the mirror when she gets home.

Once, in one of those specialty Asian zen fabric and plant stores, she saw a bowlful of truth and love and passion and hope and trust. The words were carved by laser into polished stones that cost three dollars and fifty cents each. She didn’t understand their purpose then. But now, looking back, she thinks maybe they weren’t such a bad idea after all. At least they were things you could actually carry around with you—or skip across the surface of a pond in the park.

She looks around and finds Liz Warren in the very back row shaking her head with displeasure. If Liz Warren doesn’t like the speech either, then Dixie must be on the right track. Liz is a smart girl. Dixie would never tell Liz, but she wishes that she could write a play herself and invent crazy people like Clarissa and Ivan and have them do things to each other. It must feel good to have that kind of power over things.

Though from what she’s been hearing in the halls recently, Liz and Jeremy Notion have called it quits. So maybe it’s not so easy for the smart girls either. Still, it’s all silliness. Kid stuff—

Then she sees him, Mr. Binhammer, down in front leaning against the wall. Twirling one strand of hair around her finger, she thinks that she would like to write a play about herself and her favorite teacher:

“You know we can’t, Dixie. It would be too dangerous.” Reaching out to her but pulling back his hand at the last minute. “People wouldn’t like it.”

“Why do you care about people all of a sudden?”

“Maybe you’re right. How is it that you see things so clearly?”

She shifts in her seat and decides she would go to bed with him if he asked. She wonders what he would do if he knew it were that easy. All he has to do is ask. And she would lie there smiling politely and acquiescing. He could move her all around like a rag doll.

She bites on the edge of her thumb.

Mrs. Mayhew is chugging forward, saying something important, leaning over the podium in her paisley blouse with sweat stains under the arms.

“…Integrity. We like to think of it as a philanthropic quality, a moral stance akin to empathy and generosity. Why cherish integrity? So that we do not give ourselves an unfair advantage over others. So that we do not take advantage of the good faith of our fellow men and women. We do not cheat, for example, because it makes the playing field unfair, and others will suffer. But this is only half the story. All too often we forget the other, infinitely greater value of integrity: the impact upon ourselves. Why ought we not cheat on an exam? Why ought we not plagiarize an essay? Because of the subtle and insidious damage it does to ourselves. It is a luxury to think that our moral crimes only impact our fellow students, our community. We discover too late, only when we are older and we look back and see pieces of ourselves strewn on the road behind us—irretrievable crumbs of our identities—only then do we discover that it is a luxury we cannot afford….”

What do they want from me now? Binhammer thinks. What are they asking of me now?

The girl, Dixie Doyle, is staring at him. He sees her out of the corner of his eye, sitting there in the middle of that undulating sea of girlhood. Biting on her thumb. Orally fixated. That used to be the joke when he was in high school. He wonders if it still is now. She has her hair up in pigtails, a T-shirt pulled taut over those big breasts of hers. Somebody in the teachers’ lounge was talking about an article, something about the hormones in the milk we drink, new in the last twenty years. As a result the girls develop sooner. Develop bigger.

At least Dixie, buxom, silly Dixie, is better than that Liz Warren with her constant scowling. He has given up on her, having decided that he will never be able to win her over. There she is now in the back row—always in the back row—looking miserable.

These little girls like screaming merry-go-rounds—that hot, high-tempo calliope. These little girls like panicked birds.

Then he spots Sibyl Lockhart, giving him a stare like a hypodermic injection. There is no going back there either. He remembers his stomach like a bagful of acid—bent over double after she left that night—wanting to throw up. Thinking, She’s right, she’s right, she’s right.

He hears she has been talking about him to the students. But that doesn’t bother him. The girls are fiercely loyal to men, he’s found. Plus, he feels sorry for her. She is not the center of anything. Instead, she is herself the fallout from larger relationships—the dust kicked up in a yelling match. The dust that gets in your throat and makes you cough. And down she settles, pale and ugly and nothing left of her to speak of.

But she has things to say—and when she says them, she is usually right.

Mrs. Mayhew has stopped for a dramatic pause. She gazes down over the faces of students and faculty alike. She is more listened to for her silences than her words. What is the woman talking about? Binhammer thinks.

In the opposite corner of the auditorium, Ted Hughes leans back against the wall and gazes up at the tangle of light fixtures on the ceiling. The man with the impossible name. A snake charmer. His slow movements hypnotic and seductive to all the smart girls of the school. A magician on the stage, drawing your attention to one minor prestidigitation while there are always some other machinations taking place behind his back. No. No. He is not so much of a performer. Not so crass and artificial. No, Ted Hughes is just a man who people pay attention to. A guy with uncommon charm.

The things that Ted Hughes has stolen from him. His perfect wife. His angry near-mistress. His position in the all-woman Carmine-Casey English department. His reputation as a favorite among the students.

Binhammer gives up. The man can have whatever he wants.

Then he sees Ted Hughes letting his gaze fall tiredly from the ceiling of the auditorium and dance with overwhelming disinterest across the mass of faces between them—until he spots Binhammer and, eyes locking, gives him a wide, eloquent grin, as though the two of them know something that no one else in the world can understand.

Binhammer grins back. The man can have whatever he wants.

“A quarter of a century ago,” Mrs. Mayhew continues, drilling her voice into the ears of the girls nodding off before her, “integrity was something we talked about quite a bit here at Carmine-Casey. Founded on a tradition of palpable truths, we knew how concrete goodness and decency could be. That was before such notions became abstract—before we conceded to the prevarication of the age. Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote that our age is retrospective, constructing itself on the sepulchers of our fathers. He then went on to ask why it seemed impossible to enjoy our own original relationship to the universe. Well, Emerson had the luxury of blind anticipation. As it turns out, the sepulchers of our fathers were not so bad after all….”

Sibyl Lockhart feels like she’s watching a game of chess. In fact, she frequently feels that way—watching the people around her move pieces forward and back, advancing and retreating with their eyes, seizing with their words, creating boundaries that cannot be crossed and pockets of opportunity that seem to invite danger or at least confrontation. And every now and then she feels herself being picked up and placed on the board among all the other pieces.

Look at Binhammer and Hughes, grinning at each other like two little kids who don’t know their mother is watching. All these girls—the entire auditorium full of the glowing bodies of ridiculous virgins—and the two of them gazing at each other as though they are playing marbles, the click-clack of little glass baubles being shot and ricocheted elsewhere until there’s nothing left between them but an empty chalk circle.

What is it she wants? To be a part of that gaze? To be a member of that secret inner circle of grinners?

There are men who want her. Men who would love to take her home and lavish her with the attention of their eyes, their hands, their voices. How did she end up with these two? They really believe sometimes, she can tell, that they are interested in her.

And then there’s Bruce, her ex-husband. She does not hate him. She has never hated him as much as she feels she should. A long time she waited for the vitriol to rise in her throat. She waited, closing her eyes and feeling around inside herself for some seed of resentment that might nurture itself into full-blown wrath. But she never found anything like that. Just twangs of regret for a hundred different things that didn’t mean anything.

There were nice times. Moments collected like matchbooks. A bright sun coming through the blinds and tying up his sleeping form in cords of light. Him sitting on the kitchen counter watching her attempt some complicated recipe. Putting up a picture, his voice muffled by the nails he’s holding between his lips. The pressure of his thigh against hers, sitting next to each other on a subway train.

The recognition, at distinct moments—moments like framed pictures—that she is happy.

And then she stops herself. Embarrassed by the petty dramas of her own heart. She chuckles softly and looks around as though to see if everyone else is in on the joke.

To shake herself out of this, she thinks about what she needs to do. She needs to stop by the grocery store. She needs to get her watch battery replaced. She needs to change her sheets and do the laundry. She needs to go through her shoeboxes of photographs and put them into albums. She needs to finish grading last week’s papers.

She scans the audience of girls. There, in the back row next to her friend Monica Vargas, is that Liz Warren girl. She hasn’t taught her since the ninth grade, but everybody knows about
Liz Warren. The jewel in the crown of Carmine-Casey’s senior class. The favorite daughter.

She found Liz staring at her the other day—out in front of the school. Sibyl was smoking a cigarette and turned to find the girl standing at the top of the steps gazing down purposefully at her. She looked as though she were going to say something, her mouth opened then closed. As though Sibyl were a mathematical equation that needed solving. Sibyl could see the girl’s mind working, the machinery of that fevered little brain chugging overtime, adding and subtracting and shifting numbers from one side to the other until
x
= Sibyl Lockhart.

And, damn it all, wouldn’t Sibyl like to know what that
x
is?

So she smiled at the girl and the girl smiled back, but the moment was over and Liz, seemingly satisfied with her solution, hefted her massive backpack over her shoulder and loped away leaning sideways.